End of the Personal Blogger

In last six months, something strange has happened in the blogsphere – the increased marginalization of the individual blogger. There was a time, when having a blog with your domain name, or even a blog-spot or TypePad account was the way to go. Your readers would find out through word of mouth, through blogrolls or perhaps through RSS. But that was then… today we are in the era of where big get bigger.

Let me explain. Yahoo garnered a lot of good will when it started including weblogs into their My Yahoo content reservoir. Great stuff, because it was the next wave of traffic boost, for my blogger friends. Or so I thought. I have looked high and low but I don’t find many individual blows represented on Yahoo. Instead dominating the list are more “pro” blogs like Engadget, Gizmodo and scores of others from say the Weblogs Inc, stable. (They added Buzzmachine.com to the list of lifestyle blogs, but I wonder if JeffJarvis.com would have made the cut, all things remaining equal.)
Here is a list of Tech Weblogs on Yahoo. No mention of Scobleizer or Russell Beattie’s or for sake of argument my own weblog. Google News will willingly bring in news from known blogs, like the ones mentioned before, but not from individual blogs, even if they are breaking news stories, and have more content than some of the aggregator-blogs. Google News rejected my big to get included in their Google News program, even though they include other blogs with more “pro” names.

Advertising networks like Tribal Fusion decline ads on individual blogs, like mine for instance, but are happy to put their ad-network to work for EHomeUpgrade, which is actually a blog, and often uses my content. But what got to me today was the 2004weblogawards.com – absolutely bogus list if there was any. Here is their best media/journalist blog. Oh really! How come WSJ.com’s best of the web, which is more email than blog is included in this list? I did not see Mark Evans’ name, or JD Lasica’s blog, or Doc Searls. For heaven’s sake, he wrote the blogging manual for journalists. Media Bistro??? And no Doc Searls?

I think what you are seeing is the marginalization of the citizen blogger in favor of more corporate brand names. Pity, it has to be this way

John and Jeremy are having interesting conversations about this very same topic.